AY Core Courses 2008/09
AY - Autumn Term
Greek Thought and Literature on Education
With various degrees of ambivalence, enthusiasm, depression, passion, and confusion, each of us has gone through something called education. What is "education?" What should it be? In this core class, we examine seminal works in Greek philosophy, literature and art in the spirit of hope that we may deepen our own questions, improve upon our answers, and possibly change our minds in fundamental ways. In ancient Greek thought, we expect to find our own opinions concerning education to be reflected and challenged. The chief vehicle for this examination, the text we most often take our bearings from, is Plato's Republic, probably the most profound and influential investigation of education ever written. We read and discuss various works (such as: the Iliad, the Works and Days, poems of Sappho, the Parthenon, and Hecuba) in between sections of the Republic in order to help us to better appreciate and evaluate the arguments and the actions taking place in the dialogue, and to develop our capacities to be informed interlocutors for Plato and for each other. (10 credits)
AY - Winter Term
Art and Politics in Renaissance Florence
A visit to Florence (Week 10) is an experience whose magnitude in and by itself justifies a Core term as preparation. The history of Florence, and Florentine art in particular with its "organic" development, has been seen by historians and philosophers as exemplary for the development of a human ideal that is strongly tied to the humanist ideal of liberal education. The growth of Florentine art itself raises some of the largest philosophical-aesthetic issues about art as such. Students develop a sense of what it means to relate to a historical period, and the historical development of a culture as representative for the study of human value. (10 credits)
AY - Spring Term
Property
'Property' is defined in its broadest sense as something owned, whether in common or by right of some individuals to the exclusion of others. Although thus associated with discrete objects, it implies as a concept the possibility of a whole mechanism of social regulation, stipulating what things are owned by whom, and in what ways. 'Property' also extends beyond the category of objects or things in an important historical sense: it has encompassed the legal ownership of some individuals by others, in conditions of greater or lesser abuse and disenfranchisement. Furthermore, the relationship of control and possession between persons and things implied by property ownership has never been stable or assured: theories of property often explore the shaping influence that owned objects have on their proprietors, and the decisive effects that various forms of social organization and their proprietary modes have on human consciousness. This shifting boundary between human being and object resonates with one of the term's meanings: it is synonymous with 'characteristic' or 'attribute', in other words, a 'property' that the individual contains or in him or herself. (10 credits)